The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (56 page)

This negative response to the American government’s prosecution of the war—matched by the strong hostility of the Northern public to Britain—was clearly related to decades of Anglo-American conflict going back to the
War of 1812 and the
American Revolution. At the very beginning of the Civil War, Britain led other nations in recognizing the Confederate states as a belligerent power and declaring its own neutrality in the conflict, an act that outraged Secretary of State
William H. Seward, who kept warning of war if Britain took the next step of recognizing the South as a nation. Given Britain’s deep dependence on cotton from the Southern states and the war’s effect in
paralyzing the cotton textile industry, bringing mass unemployment to Lancashire, Southern leaders were initially very confident that the need for cotton would make British and wider European intervention inevitable. The South even imposed an informal embargo on cotton exports, which ironically reinforced the limited effects of the Northern naval blockade on the South. Even some British antislavery writers were convinced that a Northern victory would continue to jeopardize Lancashire’s main supply of cotton and result in permanent tariff barriers on British manufactures.
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Many Britons even believed that Confederate independence would actually hasten emancipation by separating the South from the racist and antiabolitionist North, and exposing the Confederacy to pressure from “progressive” free-labor nations. Confederate agents and propagandists did their best to confirm such expectations, and spread lies to a gullible British public about the Confederacy’s intent to abolish slavery after winning independence. Late in the war, some British leaders expressed great regret that Confederate president
Jefferson Davis had not emancipated the slaves in 1863, when the successes of
Robert E. Lee’s army had reached its highest point.
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As news arrived in England in September 1862 that Lee’s army was marching north and had invaded
Maryland, Lord
Palmerston, the seventy-seven-year-old prime minister, revived plans for intervention. Though long committed to antislavery, Palmerston had experienced bitter conflicts with the United States when he was foreign secretary. Fearing, with some reason, the American goal of annexing Canada, he complained that Yankees were “disagreeable fellows,” “totally unscrupulous and dishonest and determined somehow or other to carry their Point.” Such negativity was reinforced during the war by a succession of conflicts with the Union that on occasion threatened the possibility of Britain’s entry into the war. As late as December 1864, Lord
John Russell, Britain’s foreign secretary, told
Charles Francis Adams that the responsibility for preventing an Anglo-American war depended on the two of them finding “a safe issue from this, as we had from so many other troubles that had sprung up during this war.”
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By early September 1862, Confederate victories not only seemed to fulfill Palmerston’s criteria for recognizing Southern nationhood, but convinced the French foreign secretary that “not a reasonable statesman in Europe” believed the North could win the war. As Palmerston anticipated news of “a great battle” north of Washington (
Antietam),
he proposed having a cabinet meeting, where he would present a mediation plan that he would offer to both North and South. If the North accepted, and Palmerston stressed that a “thorough” defeat would “bring them to a more reasonable state of mind,”
Britain would recommend an armistice, an end to blockades, and a negotiated separation. If only the South accepted, Palmerston concluded, “we should then, I conceive, acknowledge the independence of the South.”
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Lord John Russell and
William E. Gladstone, chancellor of the exchequer and son of a
West India merchant and slaveholder, were far more enthusiastic about intervening to end the war and the terrible bloodshed. The battle at
Antietam (25,000 casualties in a single day) convinced Gladstone that only Britain had the power “to stop the humanitarian crisis unfolding in America.” Even after the news of what he termed “Lincoln’s lawless proclamation,” Gladstone urged forming an alliance with France and
Russia to force the Union and Confederacy to agree to an armistice. And Russell not only urged the cabinet to intervene and settle the war, but made a somewhat successful overture to
Napoleon III via the
British ambassador in Paris.
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But Palmerston was shaken by the wholly unexpected news of
Lee’s rout and retreat at Antietam, which raised new questions about the weakness of his army and the outcome of the war. He also feared that any involvement might lead Britain into the war (given Seward’s warnings), and felt a strong need to wait before making any decision. Though Russell and Gladstone continued to press for intervention, on November 11 the cabinet endorsed Palmerston’s argument against moving beyond the position of neutrality.

In addition, despite initial negative press reaction, by early 1863, Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation aroused growing public support for the North. An outflowing of pamphlets and books coincided with widespread “Emancipation Meetings” celebrating the antislavery goals of the Union. The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society abandoned its pacifist stance and endorsed the Union’s emancipationist cause, which, given the bleak views of British West Indian emancipation in the 1850s, put British historical leadership in an entirely new perspective. This point was powerfully confirmed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which permanently freed all American slaves and evoked enthusiastic British support.
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Although British responses to the war continued to fluctuate, given the complexities of the transatlantic relationship, liberal leaders
became increasingly aware that a Union defeat would shatter prospects for electoral reform in Britain. As the war progressed, an increasing number of intellectuals, evangelicals, and labor reformers agreed with
Goldwin Smith “that the union cause was not that of the negro alone, but of civilization, Christian morality, the rights of labour, and the rights of man.”
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The changing British responses to the American Civil War underscore two broad points. First, the extreme fortuity and contingency of the final stage of the Age of Emancipation. Second (as we will see in part 3), the fact that America’s
Emancipation Proclamation and especially the
Thirteenth,
Fourteenth, and
Fifteenth Amendments represent the climax and turning point of the Age of Emancipation, with the sudden liberation of some 4 million slaves—far more than had ever been amassed in one part of the New World—followed by their award of citizenship and the right to vote.

Turning first to the issue of contingency, it is now clear that New World bondage was not a retrograde or economically backward institution that, without war or abolition movements, was headed for natural
extinction. In
Cuba and
Brazil as well as the American South, slave labor was not only profitable and productive but was deeply intertwined with transatlantic industrial capitalism and had become compatible with the latest technology, from steamboat transportation to sugar mills. New World slavery actually anticipated the efficiency and productivity of factory assembly lines, and in the American South exhibited enough flexibility to put slaves to work in mines, building canals and railroads, and even manufacturing textiles and other industrial products. By 1860, two-thirds of the wealthiest Americans lived in the South, where the value of slaves continued to soar along with a major export economy. Many slaveholders dreamed of annexing an expanding tropical empire ranging from Cuba to Central America, and it is conceivable that an independent Confederacy might have moved in that direction.

In a very important recent work, historian
Walter Johnson points out that our standard accounts of the coming of the Civil War focus on the territorial spaces that resulted from the war and overlook the plans for territorial expansion before the war. Such accounts not only
minimize the growing significance of the
Mississippi River’s great “
Cotton Kingdom,” but ignore the fact that slaveholders in that region had a vision of a proslavery empire in which
Cuba,
Nicaragua, and the reopening of the African slave trade were far more crucial than congressional debates over slavery in
Kansas. Many of these concerns were shared in other parts of the Deep South and should be kept in mind when considering the contingencies of a Confederate victory or of continued peace.
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Johnson shows that the Mississippi Valley, centered on
New Orleans and containing more millionaires per capita than any other part of the nation, was a highly distinctive part of the South. Since steamboats could sail up as well as down the Mississippi (by 1860, more than 3,500 arrived at the levee in New Orleans), since the hundreds of millions of acres of upriver land were especially fertile, and since New Orleans long exported most of the cotton used in the
British textile industry and brought in much of the financial credit that America absorbed from Europe, it’s not surprising that the region took in most of the million slaves transported from the Upper South (especially
Virginia and
Maryland) to the Deep South from 1820 to 1861.
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Slaveholders in the Mississippi Valley were especially alert to the Northern antislavery strategy of building a wall or “
cordon” of freedom around all slaveholding territory—a vision eloquently expressed, as we have seen, in Frederick
Douglass’s lectures in Britain. This strategy to contain and demoralize slaveholding would also become central for Lincoln’s Republican administration from 1860 well into the Civil War. It is therefore highly significant that in an 1857 article in
DeBow’s Review,
William Walker defended his war in Nicaragua as a struggle for “whiteness” that involved “the question whether you will permit yourselves to be hemmed in on the South as you already are on the North and West—whether you will remain quiet and idle while impassible barriers are being built [especially by the British] on the only side left open for your superabundant energy and enterprise.”
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Walker’s focus on Nicaragua was preceded by a number of filibustering efforts to overthrow the Spanish regime in Cuba, which even John Quincy
Adams and other national leaders viewed as a “natural” and inevitable part of the United States, given Cuba’s location and the long decline of the Spanish New World empire. But whereas the American government relied on diplomacy with Spain, and outlawed
military expeditions against countries at peace with the United States, Southern expansionists were deeply concerned with the need to revitalize an economy overinvested in land, slaves, and steamboats. They were also alarmed by Britain’s anti-slave-trade interventions in slaveholding Cuba, following the emancipation of British colonial slaves.
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Cuba was said to be “the Sentinel of the Mississippi” and “the Mistress of the Gulf of Mexico”—the stepping-stone from New Orleans to the Atlantic and the Pacific. But since Central America provided the only short, noncontinental access to the Pacific, a matter of even greater importance before the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, Nicaragua offered an added attraction in terms of trade. Moreover, if Walker had succeeded in permanently restoring both slavery and the slave trade, control of Nicaragua would destroy any cordon of freedom.
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William Walker graduated
summa cum laude
at age fourteen from the University of Nashville; he spent two years in Europe and obtained both law and medical degrees.
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He became a popular figure throughout the South and drew financial and military support from
Mississippi Valley slaveholders. In 1856 he became “a more or less self-appointed president” of Nicaragua after intervening in a civil war with a group of mercenaries and briefly establishing a filibuster government that evoked for the South the vision of a proslavery Latin American empire. Walker’s government restored Nicaraguan slavery and also reopened the African slave trade at a time when states in the Deep South were calling for such a measure to meet the growing demand for slave labor and, in view of the rising price of slaves, to enable the growing and mistrusted population of nonslaveholding whites (some 40 percent of the white population) to become part of the slaveholding elite. Walker also addressed this concern by arguing that nonslaveholding whites would be able to migrate to places like Nicaragua, where they could become members of the ruling white master class.
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While Upper South leaders in states like Virginia and Maryland naturally opposed any reopening of the African trade, which would undercut their own internal slave trade with the Deep South, Mississippi Valley and
South Carolina planters expressed growing fears that the internal trade was “draining” the Upper South of slaves and thus threatening the solidarity of the South as a whole. Walker’s forces were defeated in 1857 by a coalition of Central American armies, and
he was then executed in 1860 after another filibustering expedition. Yet he had continuing influence on Confederate scenarios of securing a southern frontier against abolitionist encirclement.
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Among countless contingencies, if we keep in mind America’s conquest of
Cuba and
Puerto Rico in the
Spanish American War of 1898, as well as the hypothetical removal of the crucial impact of America’s Civil War on Cuban and Brazilian
emancipation in the 1880s, it seems quite possible that, despite British opposition, a victorious Confederacy might have acquired Cuba and Puerto Rico and created at least a minor slaveholding empire. This effort to present a wholly “modernized” version of racial slavery would have been reinforced by the shocking rise and spread of “scientific racism.” The article on “Negro” in the renowned 1911 edition of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
underscored the semiofficial consensus that “mentally the negro is
inferior to the white.”
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It is certainly clear that without a Civil War, American slavery would probably have persisted well into the twentieth century, significantly setting back “the century of New World emancipation.” As for any argument that slavery is wholly incompatible with “modernized” nations, in the 1940s the productive Nazi and Soviet economies became dependent on more enslaved people than ever existed at one time in the New World.
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